SANFORD, Florida (Reuters) - A Florida judge on Friday delayed her ruling on whether to impose a gag order in the case of George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch captain charged with fatally shooting unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. During a hearing in Seminole County Circuit Court, Judge Debra Nelson said that she plans to issue her ruling on Monday. A gag order would ban media, lawyers and others from publicly discussing the case. ...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - The U.S. National Park Service has completed a five-year clean-up of fuel tanks ejected by U.S. fighter jets over Alaska during the Cold War, along with other junk unrelated to the planes, officials said on Friday. The litter, largely consisting of spent fuel tanks dumped by military jets doing maneuvers in the 1970s, was hauled off park lands in the Kobuk Valley National Park and the Noatak National Preserve in northwestern Alaska. ...

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SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (Reuters) - Mourners gathered on Friday for the funeral of former U.S. Senator George McGovern, a soft-spoken South Dakota native and passionate opponent of the Vietnam war who shaped the Democratic Party even in a landslide defeat in the 1972 presidential race. Close friends, family and those he mentored directly and indirectly called McGovern a man of principle and decency during a prayer service on Thursday night. ...

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The so-called fiscal cliff of automatic spending cuts and tax rises set to occur on January 1 if Congress fails to act before then will be the most important issue facing the next U.S. president after the election, BlackRock Chief Executive Laurence Fink said on Thursday, saying there is a "very strong risk" of another U.S. ratings downgrade. Fink, addressing a conference hosted by The Economist magazine, lamented that President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney did not address the cliff in their pre-election debates. ...

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CHARLESTON, South Carolina (Reuters) - As many as 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers belonging to South Carolina taxpayers could have been exposed in recent cyber attacks on the state Department of Revenue's computers, officials said on Friday. The vast majority of the credit card numbers were encrypted, but about 16,000 were not, meaning the data was fully exposed, state police said. None of the Social Security numbers were encrypted, said State Law Enforcement Division spokesman Thom Berry. ...

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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (Reuters) - Voters in Alabama will decide next month whether to remove racist language from the state's 111-year-old constitution, and the ballot measure has drawn opposition from what might seem an unlikely group: black lawmakers. Amendment 4 asks voters if they support deleting references to separate schools for white and black children and a poll tax, wording already invalidated long ago by federal law. ...

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The nanny suspected of slaying a Manhattan professional couple's two young children began stabbing herself as the mother entered the bathroom and began screaming when she saw the dead bodies in the bathtub, New York's police commissioner said on Friday. The nanny, YoSelyn Ortega, had been employed by the family of Kevin and Marina Krim for two years before police said she killed their children and attempted suicide on Thursday in the family's luxury apartment, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. ...

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